Month: December 2002

Ever have that feeling as you’re walking normally that suddenly you’re in an elevator that’s taken a quick change in velocity? Like you’re reaching the bottom of a tall building, and all your weight shifts to your feet, but you’re actually standing flat on the ground.

I had that just now.

The word of the day is “subloop”, which has interesting vowel sounds. Say it to yourself for the full effect. From subloop, we — the cult of subloop — have created many other words, including but not limited to: subloopinal, subloopinis (perhaps spelled subloopenis), sublooper, and subloopish.

Now I will tell you a quick story to explain what music I’m listening to.

Once, I broke up with a girl. I was in bed sick when I did it, but it was probably for the best anyway (we fought more than I have with any other girlfriend). She then proceeded to date another person, who was a mutual acquaintance, albeit not someone either of us knew well. Because I kept in contact with her at this time (partly because I wanted her back litterally a week after breaking up with her–a pining that continued for at least six months) I managed to hear some of this guy’s music. We shall call him O. O’s music was… how should I put it… crap. It mostly consisted of sounds taken from relatively obscure (but still popular) music, looped and thrown together. Because the loops were very recognizable, it was a bit like a Queen fan listening to Ice Ice Baby for the first time. O’s relationship with my X aside, I was not going to like this music. Even if it was good. (Taking his relationship with my x into consideration, probably especially if it was good.)

O has always seemed very conceited to me. He’s always acted very cold towards me, and the times when I’ve had to be around him (for whatever reason) we have probably never exchanged more than 5 words. In short, I do not like O.

O continued to make music, and through a series of performances he was a part of, I continued to hear it grow and become quite a bit more distinct over the past 3 or 4 years. (While still, inside, trying to convince myself that it was crap.) Now O is dating a very public figure in the local music community, and he put out a limited run of a short (< 30 min) CD. There is no longer any denying it. Damnit, the CD is fucking good. I don’t want to like it, but I’ve been listening to it for a few days straight now. The end.

Daring Fireball has a new rant about the finder which (although it does a little backpedaling) is a far more convincing argument for his original point, which is basically, that the OSX finder sucks ass.

I have been using OSX since the beta. I have intentionally put up with the slowness and inconsistent nature of the finder, assuming that, as with other problems in OSX, they will eventually get fixed. This is still my belief, although it may take a bit more whining from intelligent people like John Gruber and Jeffrey Zeldman before it happens.

In the mean time, I have never done it, but there are supposedly some 3rd party finder replacements out there. (doing a search, I found a few whose pages are down… I wonder why. Only one I could find that is presumably still in development, and its page is in Japanese.) Anyway, an old post on on macosxhints.com is probably the only reason I knew about this, and I had to dig to find it.

The real reason I have beef with the osx finder personally, is that at work I have been using OSX’s built-in samba mount capabilities to mount our dev sites. This means that I’ve been using the finder much more extensively, mostly in a drag and drop fashion. (Although it’s nice to be able to point my terminal at those mounts and vim them locally, for this particular project I’ve mostly been using dreamweaver.) Anyway, for whatever reason, either samba or the finder are creating weird invisible files on the mounted servers. They look like this:._filename.html. Is this normal? WTF? It’s as annoying as hell when I go to commit the stuff to CVS, because these directories contain twice as many files as they should!

In the next post, Gruber rants about Wired’s poor mac coverage. (They have one guy who writes a mac column, and he’s a moron.) I’d agree with him that the coverage is horrible, (and that the guy is a moron), but at the same time — since when have they had serious hardware coverage? I don’t really think that’s their “bag”, so to speak. The only reason they employ this mac guy is to explore the self-titled “cult of mac”, which I have to admit is fairly funny, and interesting. It does leave one with the impression that all mac users are freaks, however. (Then again, I like being called a freak.)

I’d just like to point out that I hate when I wake up at 5 AM and can’t sleep almost as much as I hate those invisible files.

enough geeky blogging. back to bed…

UPDATE: Westwind computing hosts a page on Mac OS X Hidden Files & Directories that solved the ._filename.html question. It’s still stupid now that I know why it happens.

It’s been one of those mornings…

I managed to have my email client crash on me twice this morning, and one of those times I was actually in the middle of composing a blog entry. It’s forever lost, as I was hurriedly doing several things at once, and I can only remember part of what I had said. (I hate loosing things I’ve written. I’m rather obsessive about it.)

The day started out so beautiful. I walked out of my door this morning, saw this weird flatbed truck in the middle of the street carrying strange looking machinery, and walked right back inside looking for my digital camera.

The part of the entry I can remember was my disappointed review of Jeff Noon’s Falling out of Cars, which I finished this weekend. Basically, it kept up this awesomely poetic tone, (which I would be hard pressed to keep up for more than a few pages, I’m sure), but failed to tell a decent story. I guess Noon is working on reinventing narrative, or some other equally extraordinary description, but in this particular instance, I think it failed to communicate. I would have liked a better picture of the milieu, or more plot, either one would have done me fine, but when there’s essentially no plot to speak of, and the main character’s observations about reality are all pretty much subject to question… we have a broken mirror’s reflection of a novel indeed. (Broken mirrors featured prominently in the story. The main character was searching for what was probably Alice’s.)

I am now reading Michael Marshal Smith’s Only Forward. Every time I go to amazon.co.uk it suggests this guy, and I’d never heard of him, so I finally broke down and bought this one (when I bought Falling out of Cars). So far I’m glad I did. It’s is a fun future detective novel, and so far a bit reminiscent of Stevenson’s Snow Crash, albeit not quite the same level of action-packed intensity.

You can check out my mindblurbs for the brainstormed list of titles for this entry.

I found an article on voulentary downsizing while surfing http://www.pseudofamous.com/ for the first time today. I haven’t read it all yet, but the gist of it was that there are these people who apparently don’t live month-to-month, and thus can afford to take lower paying jobs and work less. (or at least less-hard).

Well, whoop-de-fucking-do.

I guess this is a new idea or something… The fact that I (and millions of other people I’d imagine) have been looking for a way to make enough money to pay the bills while only working part-time is not, apparently.

As of quitting time yesterday, Laura had worked 24 hours in the last two days. The joys of christmas season at a photo lab… I don’t envy her, but it’s strange, she came home in a better mood than most days. Maybe it was the thought of that fat overtime paycheck.

I’m still at work at 6:30 on a friday, because this site was due at noon today, but I didn’t have all the creative until this morning. (OK, I guess I still don’t really have all the creative, but as much as I can do now is done.)

It’s dark outside, and my head is swimming. Maybe I should move to France, where I’ve heard the maximum work week is 35 hours.

Astronaut Wife is so catchy it’s making me sick! I’ve had one of their songs stuck in my head for about three days straight now, and unlike some catchy tunes, listening to it hasn’t helped alleviate the problem. In fact, I accidentally put the track on repeat on my way home yesterday (Laura finally bought me that mp3 playing CD player she promised for my birthday, so I’m still learning how to work it.) and it was almost 3 times through before I noticed!

They’ve got a new CD coming out, and I suppose I’ll have to buy it. They’re not even listed at allmusic.com, and I’ve only heard of them because I got a free ticket to their upcoming show at first ave when I went to see Lali Puna. I brought the ticket (with a few others) to juggling, and offered them to a few friends. My friend Jay seemed ecstatic that I was really giving that ticket away, and claimed he’d paid over a hundred dollars to see them last time. (which seems odd, because they’re basically this no-name techno band out of minneapolis, but he is an international traveler, so maybe he had to fly back for the show or something.) Anyway, Jay made me a mix-cd in exchange for the ticket, and that’s what I’ve been listening to for about a week now. I’m excited to see the show, and even more excited for the new CD!

The wind is whistling outside, while inside, the howl is from Laura’s humidifier and I’m almost ready for bed.

I’m contemplating a barely-remembered dream, and driving for 7 hours straight home from thanksgiving vacation. For some reason, I drove for 7 hours on sunday without even getting sick of it. I mean, I was sick of it, but I could have driven for hours more if I’d have had to. What does that say about my disposition that day I wonder? It was medative almost. I fantasized almost the entire time, not about sex, more about the house, about writing a novel, about video games, (creating them, not playing them). There are so many things I want to do with my life. This line of thought reminds me that I ran into Neil Stevenson’s homepage today, and how opposed he seems to be to things that will distract him from his writing. I think you have to be that way to really accomplish anything.

I hate to say this, but I will probably never accomplish anything. If I do, it’ll be something I plod away at for years, a novel that takes 5 years to write is still a novel. I should get started on it.

The one memorable part of our seven hour drive home was a quick detour through the windmill fields about two hours south of the cities on 35W. If you’re ever driving that way, it’s well worth it to drive about 3 miles west of the freeway to see them up close. They’re much bigger than they appear from far away. I want to go back and take pictures. I’ll drag laura, and she can take one of me standing next to one for perspective.